Every time an advertiser pays YouTube or Facebook or Twitter to place an ad in your feed, your data is the selling point. And if you pay a subscription fee to avoid the ads, your data is still being used. Big Tech wins either way, but it’s your data, writes cyber security expert Manal al-Sharif.
When you use social media for free in exchange for allowing the networks to collect and share your personal information, you are handing the tech moguls your information for free, Meanwhile Big Tech tells you they don’t “sell” your data.
Google will never sell any personal information to third parties, and you get to decide how your information is used
Sundar Pichai – CEO of Alphabet Inc
Emphasising that it’s the personal information that is not being sold sounds good, and it’s what we want to hear.
It’s also Big Tech’s way of diverting our attention from all the ways they monetise our data by using the word “sell” to imply all the traditional ways of buying and selling. You might imagine that selling data means exchanging someone’s information for a bag of money, but that’s not what happens in the digital world.
The California Consumer Privacy Act considers it “a sale”, if personal information is sold, rented, released, shared, transferred, or communicated from one business to another for “monetary or other valuable consideration”.
Privacy is dead
When Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2010 that privacy is no longer a social norm, he was pushing against the concerns raised over making Facebook’s privacy settings more intrusive to its (then) 350 million users. Facebook now have close to 3 billion users, with thousands of data points for every active user stored on Meta’s servers.
In 2013, Zuckerberg himself spent $30 million to buy houses adjacent to his house to maintain his privacy. What’s good for the goose is not so good for the gander in Zuckerberg’s world.
If privacy is dead, why does Big Tech spend today more on lobbying than fossil fuel and pharma combined to keep the algorithms of their tools a secret to everyone, even to independent researchers and regulators?
But privacy is clearly not dead. In 2005, less than 3% of Facebook users had changed their privacy settings, whereas, in 2017, about 93% of users had changed their privacy settings to a more restrictive configuration. Similarly, in 2005, about 86% of Carnegie Mellon University network members were sharing their date of birth online, in 2017 less than 12% were doing so in public forums.
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The terms & conditions that nobody reads
Big Tech gets away with monetising our data because almost nobody takes the time to read what we approve of when we tick the box.
Facebook’s 5102 word Terms of Service states:
“You give us permission to use your name and profile picture and information about actions you have taken on Facebook next to or in connection with ads, offers, and other sponsored content that we display across our Products, without any compensation to you.”
In plain English, Facebook uses our identity – including our profile photo – to show ads to other users.
Their Cookie Policy – a mere 2127 words – takes it to another level:
“Facebook uses cookies and receives information when you visit those sites and apps, including device information and information about your activity, without any further action from you. This occurs whether or not you have a Facebook account or are logged in.”
This means that Facebook stores our data whether we have an account or not.
Facebook is also known to buy data from data brokers and combine it with the data they already gather on their platforms.
Google’s YouTube service adds yet another dimension to the unlimited trove of data storage:
“YouTube may retain, but not display, distribute, or perform, server copies of your videos that have been removed or deleted.”
In other words, even if you do delete content from their service, YouTube holds onto it, presumably to continue to use the data.
And if you think your private messages are off limits, think again. Here’s a a clause in LinkedIn’s privacy policy:
“We also use automatic scanning technology on messages to support and protect our site. For example, we use this technology to suggest possible responses to messages and to manage or block content that violates our User Agreement or Professional Community Policies from our Services.”
Or to put it another way, they do read our private messages. They also don’t disclose all the ways they use the content of our private messages. Instead, they selectively give examples. That’s a known tactic of Big Tech. They only give you examples but not an exhaustive list of what they are allowed to do.
Feeding the algorithm
Our data is also being used to train their algorithms. According to tech journal ZDNet, Facebook used one billion pictures from Instagram to improve its image recognition capability. In typical tech speech, Facebook researchers:
have achieved a breakthrough in self-supervised learning
That’s a euphemism for real online surveillance on a massive scale.
Fact is, we have no clue what data they do collect about us other than the few examples they choose to list. We have no clue what “market research” or “research” they conduct using our data, and we don’t know who has access to our profiles other than what they disclose. We don’t see those “shadow profiles” that’s supposedly without identifiable data. We have no control on the accuracy of the data collected and analysed or where it is being used.
The data that Big Tech collects is the real commodity of these companies and what underpins their lofty share valuations. They collect it, store it, use it, sell it and keep it forever, even if you delete your account.
Manal al-Sharif is an author, speaker, human rights activitist and a regular contributor to international media. She has written for the Time, the NY Times and Washington Post. Her Amazon bestseller memoir, Daring to Drive: a Saudi Woman's Awakening, is an intimate story of her life growing up in one of the most masculine societies in the world.
Manal is a cybersecurity expert and host of the tech4evil.com podcast that discusses the intersection of technology and human rights.